A common trend of roleplaying games is the inclusion of some kind of morality system to disincentivise players from being a huge swaggering bellend and just up and killing everyone they encounter and stealing all their shit. For example the game Skyrim will penalise any player caught committing an immoral act by having a tireless, steel-plated digital cop try to slap them to death with a broadsword. Cops it turns out have an entire network of chicken snitches.
To explain, Skyrim, like many roleplaying games, allows players the freedom to, if they so wish, commit crimes and other immoral actions like trespassing or punching wheels of cheese onto the floor. Also like other games there are systems in place to discourage players from doing this because if they didn’t the solution to every and any problem would be crime!
Specifically the game will punish players who commit crimes with a fine, the size of which will correlate to the seriousness of the crime upto and including murder. Meaning players with the financial means can commit any crime they want provided they have enough cash to pay off the authorities, just like real life!
Anyway, there are of course ways to avoid even this, with there existing an entire stealth system allowing players to become one with the shadow, moving about the world unseen and stealing everything that isn’t nailed down. Including nails. Hell, there are even factions in game that encourage players to steal as much shit as possible and one that murders people for fun and profit who dress like dork-ass vampire losers.
If anything, the in-game guards are at a decided disadvantage to the Dragonborn and kind of need all the help they can get, fortunately they have a direct telepathic line to every animal in the game world.
This is because Skyrim has something known ass radiant AI, which basically allows creatures and NPCs within the world to interact with one another. While intended to add a touch of realism to the game it can have unintended side effects due to the sheer amount of variables needed to be accounted for.
For example in the previous game in the series this system had to be toned down as it made the AI too smart, resulting in things like NPCs addicted to drugs running across the map the moment a game began to find another NPC who sold their favoured digital drug to punch him to death and steal it. However, even after being toned down the radiant AI still resulted in things going wrong, like an NPC who is near-guaranteed to die in every player’s game as they’re programmed to be starving (which causes them to seek out food), poor as shit (which causes them to try and steal it) and shit at sneaking (which causes them to almost always be caught). The end result is the character often being found dead, or in some cases actively hunted down by a guard, when a player enters the city they live in.
Moving back to Skyrim one unintended effect of allowing NPCs to interact with animals is that animals have the ability to witness crimes and then telepathically alert guards, who will also be aware of the player’s exact location. It gets better though because initially assumed that it was only chickens who could snitch but by digging into the game’s code it was eventually discovered that every animal could do this, though due to a quirk of the game’s morality system, some animals won’t.
Curiously, despite the whole point of the game being to hunt dragons, dragons can also snitch on the player. Meaning it is entirely possible to get arrested in Skyrim because a dragon saw you steal an egg.
